Eleanor

We had all known a day like this was inevitable. We had known of it since we had been in school. You see one never knew with Eleanor. Appearances could be deceiving – one moment she was very calm, the next…not so.

I remember the day she entered school. She had been late, Mr. Matthews had explained it all but I had been into Jug at the time and could only spare attention enough to catch her name. Eleanor. What a name, I had thought. What a legacy to live up to. Of course Jug had made a joke on it and I had dutifully laughed.

I had only got a good look at her when she and I were partnered for making blood slides during Biology. Her wide-set eyes made her look dumb instead of pretty and the braces hadn’t helped. Her paisley dress had made her look more of a peasant than a hippie and I remember pitying her, for what I couldn’t be sure.

She had been anything but dumb but the idea of pricking herself had been beyond her and I had ended up earning extra credit for helping her – a first for me, an experience I am still proud of if I am being completely honest.

I had taken a liking to Eleanor after that. I would defend her when my friends would bully her, I would help her out in any way I could. Once I even helped her shop for more age-appropriate clothes. That had been an eye-opener.

You couldn’t have found a calmer person than Eleanor – or at least that’s what I had thought till that incident. I liked her, yes, and Jug, whom I had successfully bagged as a boyfriend liked to call her my pet project but I couldn’t completely relax around her. It was like even before the incident I had known she was a ticking time bomb, just waiting for a spark.

Long story short, she had gone ballistic on the saleslady, calling her words which I had only heard boys whisper in school corners, followed by sniggers. And all that the saleslady had said, “Wow Eleanor, don’t you look pretty in that red dress.” That day I had understood why I was always on guard around her.

Post that incident I had started to pay more attention and realized Eleanor had such outbursts on a daily basis in school. We heard rumours that her home life was difficult and she was simply acting out but she had told me she lived alone. Well, as alone as a sixteen year old could live. Her parents worked long hours and they were out of the house at 10 and returned only after 10. To me that sounded far from difficult. Who wouldn’t want the house to themselves, to do and be anything you wanted to be? I would have traded places with Eleanor in a heartbeat if it meant I could get away from my nagging mother for being too fat.

In the last year of school, things with Eleanor started to turn ugly. Though her outbursts had become fewer, they would come in like a violent winter storm, destroy everything and leave just as abruptly.

The mangled remains of our school’s pet dog had been found after winter break, rotting in the girls’ toilet. There had been many suspects, and equally viable, but I cannot deny even I, who had the strange privilege of being the only one who hadn’t been at the receiving end of one of her episodes, had thought it was Eleanor’s doing. She just looked the types who would do this in a fit of rage.

It was later proved it had been her. But she claimed the dog had gone rabid and attacked her. A postmortem on the dog had revealed it had in fact gone crazy. A rumour had then started that Eleanor had drugged the dog to save herself. After that I had started to maintain my distance. I didn’t feel completely safe with the girl.

School got over, we got on with our lives but I never stopped thinking about Eleanor who had looked so calm on the exterior but one could never be sure what was going on in the interior.

News of her arrest finally broke in the newspapers one fine August morning, 20 years after the dog incident. That day I was glued to the telephone, exchanging stories, reliving our school days and every incident that had happened with Eleanor.

What failed to surprise us was not that Eleanor had been found digging a grave for a boyfriend she had killed. Or that a later examination of the grounds around her childhood home had revealed bones from 5 different carcasses – including her parents – who had been dead all this time. But that they had found only 5.

What did however traumatize me was the letter I received a week after her arrest. It was a confession for 20 murders she had committed, her reasons, where their bodies could be found, and it ended with: if you put together the alphabets from their first names, they spell Rosie Maria Acosta Penn.

---

Written for the prompt given by Bonnie Cehovet. Read more here about Finish the story collaboration.